Just a shout out to how good these tiny quads are now. After being away from small quads and just flying my old whoops occasionally I got a BetaFPV Meteor 75. It flies sooo well but range is short on FrSky. So I got a Radiomaster Boxer and ELRS BetaFPV HX115SE 2023. What a great combination! The quad flies so well and the controller is all I could ask for, it's perfect for me. No it's not a powerful quad, but it is floaty, it's light, it is pretty sweet for something this size and I am digging those 6 minute flights. The range with ELRS is nice. To anyone who is still messing around with 5 year old tech, time to move on...

The dream is when video is as robust as the control link. Am I right?

I agree about the Meteor75 Pro.  I have two, and they are my goto.  Mine are on ELRS with a Radiomaster Pocket (set the packet rate to straight 250 so it will work with my Mobeetle6 SPI).  Battery connector BT2.0 is a godsend.

In gentle floaty flight outdoors I get 3:45 minutes out of a 550 mAh LiHV 1S before the "low battery" starts to flash in the OSD.  I will try hovering close to ground to see how long it goes before failsafing.  I run the vTx at 25 mW pre-arm and 200 mW in flight.

Lovely fliers.

I may get an ELRS board (FC) for my Meteor 75 I love flying it too but range is crazy short with FrSky and I want to get rid of my Taranis and just use the Boxer now. In my yard I can get 4 minute flights with the Meteor 75 easily, I run down to about 3.3V before landing.
I just got a Mobula 65 from Bangood and it flies terrific too. That's ELRS so the range is great, video is a bit sub par but doable. I need to get the square batteries and BT2.0 the Mobula 65. The cheap pillow batteries that come with it remind me of my old whoops, huge voltage drop right out of the gate. flying down to 3.1V with the batteries it came with. But I'm spoiled now by the Meteor 75 batteries and how well they work in it.
The HX115SE is so good outdoors though, it is low on power but I'm getting 6 minutes plus with 2s 450 4.2v batts with mild aerobatics, love the smooth flight, range, and camera on that toothpick.
I did find one bad thing about these being a bit too good outside. They are damn hard to find in the weeds!!!

I was quite surprised by 3" toothpick... it was like a whole new world was opened up to me.
I started large, like 10", 7" and 5", and then started to build smaller.

Way back in ancient primitive times, everybody used 1408 or 1507 and 100g frames for 3". It sucked.
KababFPV Roogi's 3" was just 65g. And 1204 which was hard to imagine. The combo worked great.
If you can get it down to 60g, it works even better.

Wow, that would be light. The HX115SE and 2s 450 is 69g. Maybe I'll get a couple 2s 300 packs just to see what it would be like.

I finally hit something hard with my HX115SE yesterday, some part of a metal structure I was flying through, and one motor shaft bent. So I'll add that these motors are not very tough! Looks like I'll need to buy a four pack too.

Sooo, these motors are not in stock anywhere now. In desperation I "wiggled" the shaft with needle nose pliers while turning it by hand and that actually got it straightened out enough that it is flying without the really bad jello. I'll buy some spares when they become available but at least I can still fly it. Moral of the story is it's not a tiny whoop, no guards, so either don't crash it or be ready to fix it if you do.

I installed a Walksnail Avatar HD Mini 1s Lite Kit in my HX115 SE today. The wiring was pretty easy, just small pads on the AIO are tricky. Luckily I had longer 2mm machine screws to hold everything together. The Walksnail camera doesn't have any way to mount it so that was pretty fiddly. But I got it aligned in the body using wire to hold it in place and hot melt glue to secure it. I removed the wire after tacking it in and finished glueing it securely. Set up in Betaflight was a breeze and it was flying in a couple of hours start to finish. But HD now, woo hoo! The HX115 SE is a cruiser and HD is for cruising, a match made in heaven.

(05-Nov-2023, 01:31 AM)romangpro Wrote: I was quite surprised by 3" toothpick... it was like a whole new world was opened up to me.
I started large, like 10", 7" and 5", and then started to build smaller.

Way back in ancient primitive times, everybody used 1408 or 1507 and 100g frames for 3". It sucked.
KababFPV Roogi's 3" was just 65g. And 1204 which was hard to imagine. The combo worked great.
If you can get it down to 60g, it works even better.

that was the time of performance :-) its not the same with the market today.
the 1408 3inch builds was competiting 5inch racequads, accelerate and deaccelerate faster than 5inch. common flown wide huge tracks does give benefits for 5inch but there was a time when technical tracks was common and 3inches was the faster choice. at least inhere th sort of raing did go for more spectacular wide tracks to attract the public, highly tecnichal thight tracks are gone.
there is pretty no track anymore where no hughe gates are placed. when i started it was commonly to only use the small gates, no huge gate at all.

performance focus on the market seems to be gone completly, there wasnt innovation: still te same parts comm8nly for racing seems years, just new versions of the esc or same motor.

todays commonly builded 3inches cant even do half the speed or half the accelertion of a 5inch racequad, the market does cycles, there might come back some 3inch power beasts to gain attantion some days.

(03-Feb-2024, 05:55 AM)husafreak Wrote: The Walksnail camera doesn't have any way to mount it so that was pretty fiddly. But I got it aligned in the body using wire to hold it in place and hot melt glue to secure it.

If you have a 3D printer, just a simple TPU mount to go around the lens with appropriately positioned screw holes and some selftapping screws works quite well and you can still adjust the angle. Otherwsie Betafpv's Micro Canopy Lite has a mounting bracket for the Lite camera and also allows for angle adjustment.

Thank you. I would like to learn to make my own parts but for now I'll try your suggestion. Hot glue is good in a pinch but not a good permanent solution.

@mstc thanks again for recommending Betafpv's Micro Canopy Lite for its Walksnail Lite camera mounting.
It is not easy to mount the camera though. There is a plastic frame which requires you to disconnect the cable from the camera. That in itself is kind of scary! The plastic frame needs to be bent around the camera, you can slide it on because there is a thin metal shelf at the cable attatchment point on the camera. I bent that shelf trying to get the frame on. But, good news, after bending the metal shelf back into position and reattaching the camera cable I got video. So it is a nice fully adjustable canopy camera combination but the actual installation is difficult and a bit risky.

You are mounting the lite camera? You don't need to disconnect the cable, I have several mounted and you can just slip on the thin plastic frame. I forget now, but I think you just slip it on from the front of the camera, the frame has a little flex and you can just pull it over the board until it snaps in.
But glad you got it on in any case.

Hmm, I guess so. I was trying to get it on that way then it looked like it was designed for the camera to slip into the holder with the cable off. But since that didn't work too well and in the end I had to bend the plastic holder a lot anyway I'll leave the cable on next time. Thanks.